Whether IT managers, directors, or CIOs (or all three) make up your information technology mailing lists, reaching out to an organization’s IT decision-makers via email can be a tough nut to crack. IT folks tend to be a well-informed bunch (i.e., keeping up with developments in their field is an unwritten item on their job description). This makes them almost pathologically allergic to sales and marketing efforts that try to “educate” them on a pain point or solution they can figure out on their own.

But with the right message delivered to the right person at the right time and for the right reasons, it’s not impossible to get decent email campaign results with your information technology mailing lists. That’s right. I’m talking about good-old email list segmentation.

List segmentation breaks up your contact database into groupings based on some criteria (more on this below). The main idea is that these groupings (or segments) let you deliver more relevant email messages, so that recipients respond better to your emails. Actual campaign results show that segmented email lists produce, on average, 14% more opens and 101% higher CTRs than non-segmented lists.

It’s a bit surprising (to me, at least) that despite the measurable benefits list segmentation brings to the table, a whopping 42% of companies still avoid using this tactic. That’s according to a DMA report that claims segmentation generated 58% of revenues and 77% of ROI in 2015.

So, there you have it. Segmentation isn’t only good for your email campaigns; it also works well at boosting your top and bottom-lines. Now, let’s go over a few segmentation techniques you can apply on your information technology mailing lists right away. Although there can be hundreds of ways to slice and dice your email lists, most of these boil down to the following:

Start with basic firmographics

I’m sure you’ve come across some fancy ways of breaking lists up. But, in most cases in IT sales and marketing, segmenting lists according to your target prospects’ company attributes can already get the job done.

Information like industry, annual revenues, geographic location, and company size are good parameters to get started with chopping up your information technology mailing lists, especially if you also throw in additional segmentation criteria such as software or technology in use along with the company’s purchase process.

Map emails to sales funnel stages

If you need a bit more precision in your email campaigns, then targeting based on where prospects are in your sales funnel is the logical next step to build on top of firmographic segmentation.

It goes without saying that emails sent to top-of-funnel prospects shouldn’t be the same as emails intended for leads that have been in your pipeline for a while. New email subscribers, for example, are most likely looking for general information about your products and company. They’re usually not yet ready for emails about product comparisons or pricing.

Follow a contact’s clickpath on your site

A clickpath is simply the series of links a visitor follows. It tracks the steps a prospect takes to get what she wants from your website.

How prospects navigate your site can reveal a lot about what they’re interested in and what their intentions are. Leads who have made it to your product pages, for instance, may be expecting a more product-oriented email message than someone who’s only been to your careers page.

Find out what content they’re engaging with

Which of your whitepapers does a prospect download? What topics on your blog does that prospect tend to view? Which of these does she share often?

The content that a prospect consumes can help you craft email messages that are likely going to resonate with that lead. If you’re able to map your content materials with your sales funnel stages, your email list segments will become even more granulated once you include content preferences as a criterion.

Keep track of responses and activities

If you’ve been using your information technology mailing lists for a while, then you’ve most probably already gathered enough data on prospect responses and email activities to identify patterns in how they interact with your campaigns.

Activities like opens, clicks, replies, and opt-outs can let you segment your list according to how engaged or interested prospects are. These interactions enable you to prioritize or reengage stalled leads with relevant messages.

Apply a lead scoring scheme

One way to put all of these different segmentation techniques together is to use a lead scoring system. A lead score quantifies many of the things we’ve talked about earlier and assigns a value to a prospect based on how that lead meets each of the criteria.

For example, a lead scoring system might assign more points to an IT director whose company falls within a given industry, but deducts a corresponding value if that contact just happens to be browsing job vacancies on your site. A lead scoring scheme can give bigger points to prospects that view a certain topic (e.g., bottom-of-funnel content) and smaller scores to top-of-funnel leads. All these points are then added in order to compute the lead score for that particular contact.

Whatever segmentation strategy you choose to stick to, the key thing is to realize that the old “spray and pray” approach at email marketing won’t work on your information technology mailing lists. It’s relevant, engaging emails which are going to get you the right results.

Surveys reveal that between 75% to 77% of B2B marketers rank in-person events like tradeshows and conferences as their top-performing marketing tactic. Tradeshows are great venues for finding qualified leads in an industry or market, since these events are where you’ll typically meet decision-makers, influencers, and thought leaders face-to-face. That’s why, if you’re looking for ways to grow your human resource email lists, joining relevant HR conferences can be the right strategy.

That is, if you know how to leverage your tradeshow attendance for email list building. For today’s post, we’ve hand-picked five proven tips you can quickly apply on your next HR event to make each contact count.

Choose your tradeshows wisely

From the SHRM Annual Conference & Exposition to the HR Tech Expo, there’s no shortage of in-person HR events happening each year. But, even if you can afford to attend every single one of them, it’s best to join only those tradeshows relevant to your target customer or solution. This keeps potential email contacts to only within your target prospects as much as possible.

So, make sure to do thorough research on a tradeshow you’re interested in. See to it that the event’s target attendees match your target decision-maker profile. Be sure that your offer is consistent with the theme or focus, and not just tangentially related.

Use the right lead capture tools

A study done by event automation provider Certain, Inc. finds that 73% of marketers still use manual data capture tools at live events. That’s despite the availability of digital lead retrieval tools that make collecting attendee contact details many times simpler and faster than with traditional fishbowl and spiral notebooks.

Capturing lead information is now as easy as downloading apps for scanning badges, administering surveys, taking notes, prequalifying leads, and doing other event lead generation activities.

Segment your tradeshow contacts

Most event marketing experts agree that contacts obtained at tradeshows and conferences need to be segmented as soon as acquired. Tradeshow contacts should be grouped according to the action or interest they’re showing. You can classify these prospects into labels like “visited booth”, “requested more information”, “set appointment”, and “general attendee”.

This helps you put together a more robust follow-up plan and send relevant messages later on. As we’ll see in the following point, segmentation lets you avoid spammy behavior as well as steer clear of opt-in issues with your human resource email lists.

Follow up on time and on point

According to the same Certain, Inc. study mentioned above, 57% of marketers say it takes four days for them to follow up with tradeshow leads. There’s, of course, no universal rule on the best time to check back with event prospects but, in general, the sooner you follow up, the better.

If you’ve classified contacts into appropriate segments, then you’ll be better able to craft a more relevant and compelling email message for each group. Don’t send the same follow-up email to all your tradeshow contacts. Always start off by reminding your leads you met at the event and tell them how you were able to obtain their contact information.

Validate and verify email addresses right away

Before you add the tradeshow contacts into your main human resource email lists, there are some things you need to do first:

Verify if the contact details are correct

Look for duplicates and redundant entries

Check whether an email address already exists in your main database

Remove hard bounces

Ask if a contact wants to opt out

Also, if the event organizer provides you with a list of attendees, you should never directly add them as contacts in your main database. The best thing to do is send one-on-one email to these contacts asking them to opt in.

With these expert tradeshow tips, it’s going to be much easier for you to cultivate your human resource email lists. The key thing to remember is to always be timely and relevant.

In a previous post, we took a look at five key metrics to gauge your list’s performance and effectiveness. But we left out one crucial KPI that you should always be keeping track of: the ROI that your list generates. As we’ll see below, measuring exactly how much return a Custom Targeted Database brings to the table can become a little challenging. That’s why we’re setting aside this entire entry to help you get started with this critical marketing yardstick.

It’s typically hard to correctly determine the ROI of most custom target lists since they’re mostly used for top-of-funnel activities. This means that, by the time a lead becomes a customer, the touch points associated with the contact list that contributed to the sale are often difficult to trace since they took place at earlier stages in the process.

To get around this, the following tips can help you reliably measure how much revenue your custom targeted database helped generate:

Know exactly where contacts come from.

In order to accurately gauge ROI, you need to find out where every contact that becomes part of your list originated from. Did a lead come from organic sources? Which paid source did a particular database record pass through before entering your funnel?

For your custom targeted database, this means having separate fields that report where and how you got the contact information.

Refine your sales funnel stages.

There’s a surprising statistic from MarketingSherpa being thrown around that claims 68% of marketers haven’t yet identified their sales funnel. If you happen to be part of this group, you need to define and refine the stages in your sales funnel right now.

What are the steps a prospect goes through before being deemed sales-ready? What actions constitute a conversion in each of these steps?

Track and score leads throughout your funnel.

Once you’ve established the precise steps that a prospect has to go through in order to turn into an opportunity, you now need to assign points that indicate how sales-qualified that particular lead is.

This is called lead scoring and is a crucial component of accurately measuring marketing ROI. Points are assigned based on the lead’s attributes (demographic and firmographic details) and their actions (interest and intent).

Match closed deals with past touch points.

Now that you’ve got contact source information and lead scores recorded in your custom targeted database, it’s time to take a look at the data for deal closes. These closes should be tied back to the series of touch points that preceded the deal.

Marketingprofs says there are four categories of closes based on source and nurture history. It’s important that you identify the right classification for a particular deal, so that credit and attribution can be correctly given.

You can now start reliably measuring the ROI of custom target lists with these four tips in mind. The main idea is that your custom targeted database does contribute to the revenues your marketing and sales processes generate, provided that you’re using it correctly in your campaigns.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. That’s according to an old business adage that’s still relevant in marketing today, especially now that marketers are drowning in an ocean of metrics and KPIs that let them know what works and what doesn’t. So what numbers should you be keeping track of to get a feel for how your B2B contact list is performing?

As you may know all too well already, everything in B2B marketing starts with your list. That’s why you need to keep this critical campaign component firing on all four cylinders. To find out whether your B2B contact leads database is really up to the task, here are the five key metrics you should always be monitoring:

Inbox Placement Rates and Delivery Rates

Inbox placement rates (IPRs) and delivery rates are two distinct metrics that measure email deliverability, although they’re often incorrectly used interchangeably. Delivery rates count the number of emails sent that didn’t bounce, while IPRs only consider emails that actually made it into the recipients’ inbox.

These two numbers can indicate the overall health of your B2B contact list. Low IPRs and delivery rates are often taken as signs that a list probably needs some scrubbing and updating. Recent research from Return Path reports that average global inbox placement rates hover around 80%.

Hard Bounces

Bounce rates refer to the percentage of total emails that were not delivered. Soft bounces happen when emails get rejected from the recipient’s server because of a full inbox. Hard bounces, on the other hand, take place when emails are not delivered because of invalid email addresses.

You want to keep an eye on hard bounce rates, since ISPs and mail providers view high levels of hard bounces as a sign of spammy behavior. To help minimize hard bounces, regularly scrub your B2B contact list for invalid or non-existent email addresses.

Unengaged Subscribers

Unengaged subscribers are inactive contacts in your list that have yet to promptly opt out. These are subscribers who remain on your B2B contact leads database but haven’t opened or responded to your emails in a while.

Sending emails to unengaged subscribers can harm email deliverability, since doing this tends to trigger spam alerts in most ISPs. So, manage inactive subscribers with a reengagement campaign or by removing them from your B2B contact list altogether.

List Churn Rate

List churn rate or attrition rate is the proportion of subscribers that either opt out or drop out of your list in a given period. Factors like the number of opt-outs, hard bounces, spam complaints, and subscriber inactivity are the main drivers behind list churn rates.

List churn tells you how fast your B2B contact leads database is shrinking. That’s why you need to acquire new contacts at a rate that exceeds the churn rate in order to grow your list. GetResponse estimates average annual list churn rates to be around 25%-30%.

Spam Complaints/Reports

Every time a recipient marks your email as spam, you’re racking up spam complaints under your sender record. Once the number of spam complaints exceeds a given threshold, mailbox providers automatically classify your emails as junk. According to data from MailChimp, average spam complaint rates can vary from 0.01% to 0.04%, depending on the industry.

While spam complaints tend to reflect the quality of your email messages, they can also give you an idea about the quality of your B2B contact list. Email lists sometimes contain spam traps, which are email addresses created by mailbox providers to catch spammers red-handed. Clearly, it’s important that you find and remove this type of address from your B2B contacts leads database to help reduce the risk of incurring spam complaints.

Now, you know the crucial set of numbers that help you accurately gauge your contact list’s performance. To gain sharper insights on your B2B contact list, don’t just passively measure these metrics against industry benchmarks. Also actively run tests designed to optimize your database on a regular basis.

You may not know it, but you’re wasting at least 12% of revenues due to bad marketing data. That’s according to a review from Econsultancy that says bad data tend to directly impact profitability in as much as 88% of companies.

That’s why proper data hygiene is as important as ever, since practically every marketer today makes decisions based on insights extracted from the data sitting in their CRM or prospect lists. In today’s post, we’ll go over the five key points you need to carefully consider in order to come up with an actionable data hygiene plan for your B2B contact leads database.

Develop a thorough data maintenance routine.

Inaccurate data occupies just one segment in the Venn diagram of bad data. There are other data quality issues—such as missing data, inconsistent data, duplicate data, and unsynchronized data—that you also have to watch out for.

So, you need data maintenance initiatives that both prevent and fix data quality issues at different stages of your data life cycle—from data collection all the way to data removal.

Remove data barriers and silos.

In a typical B2B organization, it’s not uncommon to find multiple instances of the same piece of prospect data housed in separate locations (e.g., marketing automation platform for marketing and CRM database for sales). This increases the possibility of having unsynchronized, inconsistent, and misaligned information used by different teams.

A good data hygiene plan also needs to take into account potential barriers to the free flow of data across users, teams, and departments. There should only be one version of a piece of prospect information at any given time.

Supplement manual with automated processes.

For best results, data hygiene should be carried out with the right mix of manual and automated data cleansing methods. While tools like AI and machine learning have now streamlined data hygiene tasks, there’s still a clear need to keep humans in the loop.

Take, for example, data deduplication. Most commercial data scrubbing packages come shipped with powerful deduplication capabilities, which are especially helpful for scrubbing a large B2B contact leads database. But the deduplication process still requires human input to correctly identify which redundant records to keep and which ones to discard.

Rethink your entire data quality approach.

Another key point that your data hygiene action plan needs to address is to make data quality everyone’s concern. While you need to define clear roles and assign specific tasks for maintaining data quality, it’s equally important to make sure everybody’s onboard.

Also, keep in mind that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, so you need to choose a relevant set of KPIs and benchmarks to gauge how well your data hygiene initiatives are performing.

Know when and how to look for expert help.

In some cases, outsourcing part of your data hygiene program to a data quality solutions provider is a more practical option than doing it yourself. For instance, enriching your prospect data for improved segmentation is best done with a third-party data provider, since doing this in-house can take up time and resources which could be better spent elsewhere.

So, take stock of your current data hygiene capabilities, and let a reputable data quality solutions provider handle those activities that you’d have a hard time carrying out in-house.

Now that you’ve nailed down what a data hygiene action plan should contain, it’s time for you to flesh out concrete ideas for maintaining data quality. Use these five points as guidelines, and be sure to track, test, and tweak your strategy.

If you go around asking whether to buy a B2B contact database, chances are you’d soon end up being chastised for simply just thinking about it. This is a little unfortunate, since a bought list sometimes makes more business sense. In fact, there are specific cases where buying a list can potentially bring you better results than taking the organic route.

The main reason why a lot of marketers advise against buying B2B contact databases is that people tend to use purchased lists for spamming contacts. While this is a valid point, the truth is that it still boils down to how you use a bought list that determines whether you’re engaging in spammy activities. So with that aside, here are five situations where it’s really okay for you to buy a B2B contact list:

The same can be said about using a bought prospect list in your campaigns. When your solution fixes an urgent issue or fulfills a pressing need that your target buyers are experiencing right now, why wait for leads to naturally start trickling into your funnel? Why not reach out to them and deliver value right away?

Case 2: You’ve clearly identified your target prospects.

In an eye-opening post, creative strategist Jake Jorgovan shares the story behind his cold email campaign that landed him a consulting project with a bunch of new customers including some Fortune 500 clients.

Among the key points he mentions is that he was only able to build a cold email list after knowing exactly who the target audience was. So, instead of sending generic templates, he came up with relevant, compelling email messages that cold prospects were interested in.

Case 3: You’re targeting a high-turnover industry.

It’s no secret that marketing data has an expiration date. MarketingSherpa places the average rate of database decay at about 2.1% per month or around 22.5% each year. For some industries, this can reach as high as 6.1% every month.

So if you’re targeting decision-makers in an industry where people tend to change job titles or move to new locations relatively frequently, one way to keep up is through using bought contact databases from a reputable list vendor.

Case 4: You don’t have the resources to build a list at scale.

Aside from the time investment required to help your B2B list reach critical mass, organically growing your database also needs tons of effort and the right kind of expertise.

That’s why, if you’re unable to make all these necessary commitments, buying a contact list is a more viable option. What you’re paying for when you buy B2B contact database goes beyond list records. You’re putting resources where they’re needed the most.

Case 5: You’re expected to deliver results in the near-term.

Let’s say your revenue goal for this quarter is $300,000, the average deal size is $10,000, and your sales cycle is around two weeks. That means you need to close 30 deals. At a close rate of 5%, you need to generate at least 600 new leads by the first half of the quarter to reach your targets.

While we’ve played around with figures in our hypothetical scenario above, the main point is that hitting sales targets is still pretty much a numbers game. In most industries, B2B conversion rates (lead-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-close rates) simply aren’t in your favor, so you need to start out with a large number of relevant prospects to get any meaningful results further down the funnel.

If you find yourself in any of the above situations, then by all means start looking for a trusted list vendor right now. Don’t pay too much attention to people who think they know what’s good for your campaign. Instead, let your solution, audience, industry, capabilities, and objectives decide whether you should buy a B2B contact database.

To answer this, we first need to separate the reality and the publicity behind AI’s capabilities in B2B marketing today. MarTech Advisor points to four key areas where B2B marketers can realistically expect AI to lend them a helping hand:

Scoring and ranking leads.

Segmentation and content personalization

Discovering and implementing Marketing automation strategies

Sales enablement and acceleration

At its present development stage, the best that AI technology can do is allow you to carry out the tasks in each of the above activities more efficiently. While some aspects of AI can uncover prospect behavior invisible to the unaided human B2B marketer, the reality is that AI remains just a tool, and tools are only as effective as the persons and processes using them.

Like everything else in marketing, AI depends on good data. The data currently sitting in your CRM and datasets you’re about to collect need to meet some basic requirements before starting AI-enabled campaigns. In an interesting video series, Brandon Rohrer at Microsoft Azzure thinks of data science and AI as a lot like making pizza: the better the ingredients (your data), the better the final product (marketing insights).

There are four qualities that any dataset must satisfy to be ready for AI and data science:

Relevant: Do the fields and records in your B2B contact leads database help you answer the questions you’re exploring? For example, which lead attributes in your CRM influence the likelihood that a prospect turns into a customer within the next quarter?

Accurate: How reliable are the models/profiles generated from your marketing database? Do the records contain incorrect, outdated, redundant, or invalid entries?

Connected: Are there significant gaps in your marketing data? What percentage of records contain empty fields?

Sufficient: Do you have enough records to build robust AI models?

While each of the above criteria is important, we need to carefully consider sufficiency. AI requires data–lots of data. The algorithms that power most AI applications run on vast amounts of examples in their training set. In general, the more examples you use to train an AI algorithm, the more accurate the resulting model gets.

So before you think about applying AI in marketing, you first have to bring your contact leads database up to snuff. Use the previous ideas as your guidelines and maximize the power of artificial intelligence.

Email marketing is one of the distinct ways in B2B marketing strategies that enables you to reach not just random people but actual C-Level personas in any business industries. We know that more than just being professional and direct in talking to these people, being informative is also a requirement. For these business minded individuals who needs data-driven information to fabricate logical solutions for their business, you need to educate them how your network is of significance to finding such solutions. This educational approach can be satisfactorily provided by an email. Even now, email marketing continues to expand as it has become the most known channel in prospecting. It has been taken advantage to deliver content creatively. For in email marketing, you can easily present what you want for your client through the content. It is important to note that you have to educate them first before offering them your service right away. You can condense data that you want your client to see. It can make them discern that you are very much involving them with a correct data that would be genuinely useful for them in the future. Also, you can usher them to your business’s website by suggesting it to them in case they need to further check information.

Eventually, you need to acquire an email database. This can be just the right shortcut to extending your network to numerous B2B leads. Buying a B2B email list is convenient than collecting address from a sign-up form on a website or opt-in collection campaigns through an advertising service as it saves time building an email list. This also allows any marketer to rapidly reach many people with information about his service or product, especially demographics that he may otherwise not be able to reach; thus, expanding access to new markets. What’s more is that you get yourself a whole lot of treat like generating response rate, boosting open rates and more if you get yourself a good deal from good email list provider.

Amidst challenges, email marketing continues to be one of the best lead sources for B2B companies and email database is still at large in optimizing the said marketing strategy.

What is email marketing? Email marketing involve sending emails like product advertisements, business requests, sales solicitations or donations to potential or current customers.

As a starter in email marketing, sending emails to everyone you just know through LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter might feel off to you. However, know that you are not the only business doing this kind of marketing thing. As an email marketer, you should not be afraid of sending out emails to people whether you know them or not. Email marketers send emails to a wide demographic range of people regarding what they are selling, advertising or promoting. Correspondingly, it is inevitable to get no response from your prospects when you send them an email. Some marketers may think that this is okay, but wouldn’t it be nice to receive a positive response about the email you sent to a potential customer?

So how will you raise the chances of your emails getting a response from your potential customer? Easy. Avoid being considered as a bad email marketer. Here are reminders you need to keep in mind to achieve that.

Avoid sending irrelevant emails to your prospects.

Avoid sending out two or more emails to the same prospect every day.

Avoid sending out the wrong email to wrong prospects.

Avoid sending out emails during time off or clock off.

Avoid sending emails to uninterested prospects.

Applying these simple reminders when conducting an email marketing can help you raise the chances of having a response and not be considered as one of the typically bothersome email marketer. It is always important to know if you are becoming a nuisance. Be aware of what you are doing and be sensitive about how the recipient may feel. Sensitivity to your prospects’ or current customers’ needs is a critical value not just in email marketing but in the business as a whole.

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For the past two years, there have been interesting shifts happening in the B2B enterprise like how buying decisions take place and who’s responsible for them.
This was something that the people of Caterpillar noticed when they launched four videos entitled “Built for it” for their brand campaign 6 years ago. They realized that the B2B audience was now hanging out online and is younger. Thus, they embarked on a more human, approachable and significant brand.
We are not oblivious to the fact that B2B’s audiences are online. 89% of B2B researchers take advantage of the internet during the B2B research process. Some may say that this hasn’t been much of a change from 2012. But looking at it deeply, we’ll see that the percentage of people using digital technology remains constant while what’s happening behind the scenes haven’t.
In the pursuit to find an answer, Google collaborated with Millward Brown Digital to conduct a study fielded way back 2014. They surveyed 3,000 B2B researchers about their research, purchase habits and usage of digital technology. At the end of the study, the results debunked a number of widely held B2B marketing beliefs. Also, expressing major connotations for B2B marketing game plans. Here are some of these myths:Millenials aren’t making B2B business decisions. In actuality, nearly half of the overall researchers count are millennials. The shift in B2B researcher demographic these past few years are dramatic. There was an even mix across age groups in 2012 and age 18 to 34-year-old bracket was accounted for almost half of all the researchers count, an increase of 70%, in 2014. It will be a wrong move not to market to this group.Not many researchers of B2B use mobile. Mobile usage has intensified. B2B researchers are using it throughout their entire path. According to this study conducted by Google, 42% of researchers use a mobile device during the B2B buying process and 49% of B2B researchers who use their mobile devices for product research do so while at work. Considering this, it’s imperative that you provide them with rich, user-friendly, mobile experiences.The marketing target should be C-levels. The environment of influencers around the B2B research process has altered. 81% of non-C-suiters have a say in purchase decisions. Marketing only to the highest level means disregarding the people who also need to notice you.